ETH▼$1,676.64 price dropped 6% as a fresh debate inside the Ethereum community questioned whether the network can succeed if ETH itself stays weak.
Ethereum’s price tumbled 6% to lows not seen since 2025, sparking debate about the network’s prospects should ETH fail to gain more traction.
Ryan Sean Adams, co-founder of Bankless, a crypto media platform initially focused on Ethereum, said in an X post that the idea of being bullish on Ethereum but not ETH makes no sense. He wrote:
“There is no strong Ethereum without an ETH worth trillions. Without ETH as a global store of value, Ethereum is a failed project. Full stop.”
Adams argued that ETH does more than just fuel transactions as it’s essential for DeFi, acting as bandwidth. To him, Ethereum needs ETH to function as money, not some sidelined token.
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David Hoffman, another Bankless co-founder, pushed back in replies, saying the issue isn’t that ETH has no value. He argues Ethereum was designed to reduce rent-seeking and direct value capture:
“There needs to be a mechanism that drives value to ETH. Ethereum has been architecturally designed to minimize rent-seeking and value capture. Ethereum’s architectural philosophy is antagonistic to explicit value capture.”
Hoffman said he wants ETH to become “a global store of value,” but still needs a clearer path for how that happens without simply assuming Ethereum’s useful properties will be priced into ETH.
As of press time, ETH trades around $1,660, down 6% on the day and to levels last seen in April 2025, according to Bitcoin Foundation’s price page.
As Bitcoin Foundation reported earlier, Ethereum price predictions are turning more bearish, with traders on Polymarket and Kalshi now betting more heavily on ETH falling to $1,500 or even lower this year.
ETH Value Capture Debate Returns
But Adams believes that the path already exists. He argues ETH becomes more valuable when people use it as money, whether as a store of value or a medium of exchange.
While Hoffman didn’t dismiss this, he argued that Adams was confusing the outcome with the actual process. Money, in Hoffman’s view, is “emergent,” so ETH needs stronger reasons for the market to treat it as money.
But then, the debate shifted to Ethereum’s design and how it keeps fees low and stops rent-seeking. Hoffman thinks the network could expand even if ETH doesn’t fully benefit from all that growth.
Adams pushed back on that, arguing that weak ETH also means a weaker Ethereum. If ETH trades lower, he said, the network has less DeFi value, less stored wealth and less “economic bandwidth,” which means the issue is not only whether ETH rallies, but whether Ethereum can do what it was built to do.
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